Custom counters in PC PIX

[Andrew McDonald]

The GDC 2007 talk "Advanced Performance Tuning with PIX for Windows" shows
use of custom counter in PIX for Windows (MaxBallsPerGrid, slide 17), but I
can't find out how to actually do this. The docs don't mention it, just the
built-in counter sets and those exposed by plugins. Is the plugin route how
that sample worked?

--
Andy

[Andrew McDonald]

I ran this past XDS - plugin DLLs are the way to go:

"In PIX for Windows, the option for the best data quality is to create a PIX
plugin, which you can see in the PIX Plugin sample in the DirectX SDK. The
question is, how do you set up that DLL with respect to your game to
efficiently pass the data through? The best answer is probably a named pipe
or a shared memory block. This plugin approach gets you one floating point
value per counter per frame.

Another possibility on Windows is to create and register your own PerfMon
counter, which PIX can read and integrate with the rest of your PIX data.
The Perfmon counters show up in the custom-counter-set dialog in PIX under
"Performance Counters"->"All Performance Counters." Unfortunately, PIX only
samples PerfMon data approximately every 500 ms, which is a long time.
Depending on the kind of data resolution you need, that may be easier for
you to set up.

The approaches listed [above] make sense if you are interested in tying
per-frame gameplay statistics ("number of characters in the scene", etc.) to
PIX data (draw calls, etc.), and it sounds like that is what you want.
However, if you do need high-quality timings for arbitrary gameplay
statistics, then ETW is going to be a better bet for you, albeit outside of
PIX for Windows. If you haven't used ETW yet, you can read up on it here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163437.aspx"

--
Andy

"Andrew McDonald" <myrmeco...@no-spam-thanks.hotmail.com> wrote...